> >
> > An interesting video confirms what you are saying. Search for: Jim
> > Keller On AMD's Next-Gen High Performance x86 & K12 ARM Cores.
> >
> > Saw this couple of months, but if my memory serves me correctly, he said that with the
> > same transistor budget he is able to build a faster core with Aarch64 than with x86_64.
> > Time will tell if that is true, but Jim seems to know what he is talking about.
> >
>
> Which, with no slight to Jim as I've worked with him before and he's incredibly smart, doesn't
> mean that much as he has a LOT more experience with working with ARM64 like architectures than
> x86 architectures. He's spent a significant amount of time working with various RISC architectures
> including a lot of time working on Alpha which ARM64 is very similar to.
>
> is ARM64 nicer to work with than x86? Sure, but at the end of the day, that
> doesn't mean a whole lot. The original Itanium ISA was basically Intel Alpha
> and would of been a great ISA, then they had to get HP involved.
>
> ISA means much less than many assume it to mean.

Some people (like me) assume it means about as much as much 2-3 years of Intel optimizing already well optimized architecture. The opposing side (like you) argues its matters only one year worth.
ISA does matter, but 64bit arm and Intel only differ that much that ISA doesn't matter more than that UNLESS your workload depends on fast transformation of three operand instructions to target ISA, which has quite an advantage on ARM side.